


Mandragora

by eldritcher



Series: Chorale [10]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Eventual Happy Ending, Family, Forgiveness, Incest, Love, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:42:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27786190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Fingolfin forgives.
Relationships: Fëanor | Curufinwë & Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë, Fëanor | Curufinwë/Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë
Series: Chorale [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022304
Comments: 11
Kudos: 13
Collections: The Song of Sunset AU





	Mandragora

**Author's Note:**

> Fragments restored from old drafts, offered to you for making it through 2020. Well done :) 
> 
> Notes: First person narration from Fingolfin. Please watch your step since there is violence, sex etc. We'll end in a safe place. 

It was the largest tapestry I had seen, arranged in twelve wall-length panels, showing the events that had led to my coronation. Fëanáro would have been horrified to see his son depicted kneeling before me. About the gilded edges, encircling the subject, were painted leaves of the mandragora. 

The artist made a spectacle of presenting it to me before the court.

"Let us award him handsomely and never think of it again," I muttered to Artanis, who was sitting as my counselor in court that day. 

"Perhaps we can decorate the new baths we are building?" She teased. 

I scowled at her silliness. We were building the new baths because Artanis had heard from her correspondents in Ossiriand that the vapors would cure illness. Anything to help my nephew recover.

It was doubtful that the sight of his abdication would turn him hale. 

The next matter of business was that of titles. 

Turkáno meant to establish a realm of his own. So did Findaráto and a few others. Ought they to be called Princes or Kings? 

"Kings," I said, waving the matter away. 

Findaráto, at least, would wear a crown well. I had not worn my crown to court. I did not wear it once after my coronation. My valet diligently dusted and polished it everyday. 

"We cannot allow the Dispossessed to be named Kings!" One of my courtiers shouted. Artanis nodded her head when I looked to her for counsel. 

"So be it!" I decreed, and hated Fëanáro for everything he had done to us. 

"Should we revise our lore, my King?"

Lore? 

"Nelyafinwë was King when he abdicated. Nolofinwë's claim on the throne exists because a King proclaimed it so," Artanis said dispassionately, though the flash of her bright blue eyes gave away her anger to one who knew her well. "We cannot rewrite our history unless we wish our enemies and allies to call our King a usurper." 

\-------

I walked over to Artanis after the court had disbanded. 

"What has you fretting?" I asked her. Her unease and worry had been palpable throughout. 

"You must promise not to react strongly," she murmured, eyeing the doors. I raised an eyebrow and went to close the doors, giving us privacy. 

"Maitimo means to take a realm in the East," she said in a low voice. Her hand came to my wrist when I cursed. 

"If he thinks I am letting him out of my sight-" 

I cut off my words with effort seeing Artanis brace herself for my fury. Her father had only shown her his helpless rage once, on the Ice. And when she had refused to heed him, he had begged me to keep her safe. 

I took a deep breath and pressed a kiss to her cheek. "I shall speak to him." 

She raised her eyebrows. I thumbed them gently. Her eyebrows had been unkempt since we had left Valinor. Unlike Irissë, who had never taken the pains to groom herself in the fashions of our people, and Tyelko, who had not given a whit to her presentability, Artanis had had the sense to take a lover who excelled at grooming. 

"Macalaurë seems to have found the time to pamper you," I teased her. 

Her eyebrows were dainty and shaped with care and precision. Macalaurë might not have held a chisel in his life willingly, but he had an eye for detail and unending patience. 

Artanis blushed and scowled at me. 

"Careful," I warned her, thinking that her father might have done the same. 

"We know what we are doing!" She replied, flustered, color high on her cheekbones. 

I doubted it. Well then, I would wait to intervene. In the grand scheme of things, their romance was hardly the worst union in our family. This role of mine, to fret over the welfare of all our children, had turned me sleepless. I had not once minded the pursuits of my children in Tirion. 

A brother that had burned the ships, a brother that had turned back, and I had marched forward, hungry and cold, for our children had nobody else.

\-----

I found Russandol in the training fields we reserved for the private use of our family. He was with Findaráto, who was patiently helping him relearn form. 

I had taught him once, on the plains of Tirion, and there had been only mischief and laughter. Neither of us had taken it solemnly, for what need did we truly have for swords in Valinor? Fëanáro, aghast at our tomfoolery, had ordered Laurefindë to teach the rest of our children. 

Findaráto's technique had been learned under Laurefindë's diligent tutelage. Footwork, Laurefindë held, was everything. Russandol did not have the balance to keep a steady stance as they moved from form to form. Findaráto, well-attuned to him, as all of his diligent carers were, caught him each time he faltered. 

"You must let me fall!" Russandol complained. "I shan't learn how to otherwise."

"Perhaps when Artanis has fixed your bird bones, cousin!" Findaráto teased, catching him once more. He caught sight of me then, and cheerfully greeted me. 

"The stuffy courtiers let you slip away earlier than usual, uncle! Come spar with Maitimo! He has worn me out and I need a nap." 

"Liar," Russandol said good-naturedly. 

"A devastatingly handsome liar, cousin, and don't you dare forget it!"

"Keep on so and I shall recommend that Nolofinwë send you as an emissary to the Dwarves!"

Findaráto had appointed himself to teach Russandol all that he had to learn again: writing and dancing, riding and the sword. Findaráto knew how to avoid tripping on the sharp edges of pride and shame that plagued Russandol, and Russandol knew how to abet him in the endeavor. They trusted each other deeply, and I wondered once again why my brothers had not trusted me. 

I stepped onto the field, accepted the wooden sword Findaráto had been wielding, and scowled at Russandol, so that he knew the extent of my displeasure. 

"What have I done?" He asked sweetly, and it was all I could do not to shake sense into him. 

"You are to stay with me," I said tersely, settling into sparring form, watching him with an eagle eye. 

"I promised Thorondor that I shall make my nest beside his," he replied merrily, clumsy-footed and yet calculating in his movements. 

His strength had been in feinting, and with his disabilities I found it difficult to understand if he were feinting or genuinely struggling to keep form. As we sparred, I could see that his mind was as sharp as ever, but his body refused to obey him anymore. 

When he had initially broached the idea of learning to wield the sword again, Macalaurë and Artanis had vehemently opposed it. I could not bear to see him disheartened, so I had encouraged him onwards. 

If I had known that he was planning to migrate to Angband's porch, I might not have encouraged him to be self-reliant. 

"I am not allowing you to leave," I told him plainly, drawing him out from his feints into a true defense, nudging his blind spots so that he would begin to adapt. "I did not follow you across the bloody Ice to see you move elsewhere."

"Nolofinwë, my younger brothers and cousins are leaving!" He exclaimed, and his form was slowly settling into steadiness coached by my deliberate demonstration of his weaknesses. A fast learner; it had ever been his curse and boon. 

"They are hale. You are convalescing," I chided him. "Be reasonable, Russandol!"

"I can lounge about in a bed anywhere on Arda," he replied. "I shall only be underfoot if I stayed."

"We ruled a city together for centuries. We can rule a realm together without getting on each other's nerves." I scowled at him. 

"Your courtiers shan't approve, and they would be right to do so," he said steadily. 

Furious at his stubbornness, I began to batter him down, careful to keep my blows to the flat of his blade. Perhaps knowing how far he had on his road to recovery would stay him from folly. 

He flung his blade away, eyes dark and limned in sorrow. 

"What is it?" I asked him, casting aside my wooden sword, taking him in my arms. Close to, he smelled of the mandragora Artanis plied upon him to alleviate his pain. 

"Russandol?" 

He shook his head and pressed his face into my shoulder, letting me carry the frail weight of him. 

"I shan't allow anything to harm you again," I promised. "Stay with me." 

"You will have your son with you," he said thickly, and I felt his tears on the linen I wore. 

"I have no qualms in sending Findekáno elsewhere if you stay," I told him truthfully. 

He shook his head. 

"My darling boy," I said helplessly, clutching him close, caressing his new head of hair that the sunset had painted crimson. 

Artanis and Macalaurë had had to shear all of it away, to tend to the wounds on his scalp. He had endured it in silence, but I had wept. It had grown back rapidly, and I was grateful for the small mercy. 

"I have to leave," he said finally, voice worn away to a thread by exhaustion and despair. 

He had not spoken of what had occurred in Angband. He had not confided in any of us as to why he had decided to meet Morgoth in parley. I knew him well enough to know he had not gone unwittingly to the discussions of their truce. What had been worth this? 

"Very well," I said softly. "I trust you." 

* * *

"She must be cold."

I stared at the horseshoe they had retrieved. It was the only possession of hers they had managed to find in that forsaken forest she had ridden into. 

"I left her maps and warm clothes," Russandol said softly. 

He had managed to break into the chamber I had locked myself into for weeks. Despite my fury and grief at our helplessness to find my daughter, I could not fail to notice how my nephew seemed changed. When he had left me in this castle, and chosen to rule in Himring, he could barely manage a night of sleep without his opiates. He had flinched at every shadow or clatter. He had avoided riding outside the periphery of our settlement. I had had to coax him to come to court, reluctant as he had been to interact with those outside our family. 

Our emissaries often spoke of the greenhouses of mandragora and poppies he grew. I had feared that he may have changed in mind and temperament, with his long exposure to opiates. 

He was himself, despite his crutches. 

"Go away," I ordered him half-heartedly. "You did not bring her back to me. You promised. You promised! You are as your thrice-damned father! He broke every promise he made!"

He said nothing to that, letting me rail until my wrath collapsed into sorrow. Then he fetched the bread and broth he had brought in. 

"I don't want it." 

Artanis had come to my door every day, begging me to eat. I had not granted her entry. Russandol had had the smiths break him in. He might have given me the crown, but our people listened to him despite my explicit orders to let none in. Traitors. 

"I have not eaten in three days," he confessed. Frowning, I made to chide him, but he continued hastily, "I knew you were starving yourself. I decided I would break my fast with you." 

I scowled at him, seeing through his transparent manipulation. He clambered on the table and pulled the platter to him. Dipping the bread into the thick broth, he brought it to my mouth. How many times had I fed him so, when my son had brought him back to me? 

Onions and lamb. 

His parents had left him to me. I had raised him as mine. When I worked to administer my father's city, I would have him with me, cosseted safely on my lap, as I taught him all that I knew. _Father_ , he had called me, and I had not corrected him, not until my brother came to visit, and promptly threatened to take the boy away from me. I had sat the boy down and told him not to call me Father again, and ordered him to call a stranger by that appellation instead. He had been a sweet and well-tempered child, but he had refused to eat for days, taking himself to his quarters to mope. My brother had strived his utmost to lure the child with sweets and crafts and gifts, in vain. Fëanáro had finally thrown up his hands in disappointment, and took his leave, abandoning his son again to my care. I had had the kitchens slaughter a lamb then and cook a broth of onions and meat, and gone to the boy then, and pressed him to break his fast. 

"You seem faraway, uncle."   
  
It had been our agreement after that event in Tirion. Fëanáro would leave the boy to me as long as I taught the boy to call him father. Russandol, despite his reluctance, had given in. Fëanáro was dead, but we continued to heed our promise made to him. 

"Your coordination has improved," I said, refusing to remind him of our past, of a time when my brother had been alive and sane. 

"Did you doubt it would?" He asked, laughing. "You taught me to persevere."

There was an ease in him as he lounged on my table, feeding me bites of broth and meat. I had lost my daughter, but it had brought my nephew back to me. I had not seen him in decades. I had only his letters. Greedily, I cupped his face and pressed a kiss to his brow. 

"You reek of onions!" He protested. 

"I kissed you when you stank of eagle feathers," I reminded the dear thing. 

"Thorondor shall be offended!" He exclaimed. "It is the scent of his courting pheromones."

"Hasn't that feathered blight been courting for decades?" 

This I was grateful for, to slip back into our ways of conversation even if we had not been in each other's presence for years. 

"Not everyone has your ability to draw suitors at whim, uncle!"

I harrumphed. He set away the empty platter. 

"Stay awhile." 

"Of course," he said easily, as if he had never left me. "Your court has demanded that I see to the backlog of administrative matters that has piled up in your absence."

"Have Artanis see to that!" I complained. "I want you with me." 

"She is not well," he said gently. "I have asked her to stay in her quarters to recover."

"Findekáno-"

I saw the truth in Russandol's eyes before he said a word. Findekáno had failed this time. He had come back empty-handed, and must have drunk himself into a stupor. He had a violent temper in insobriety. I hoped that he had had the sense to keep himself in his quarters. 

He had hit a maid once. Irissë had been there then to talk sense into him. She was not afraid of her brother even when he was deep in his cups. 

"She must be hungry," I muttered. 

"She could make a meal of Thorondor if she wanted to," Russandol reminded me. "Irissë knows to hunt and forage better than rest of us."

He got to his feet and pulled me up, urging me to the bath. He kept up a steady chatter as I completed my ablutions, the familiar cadence of his voice keeping me grounded. Whenever I thought of my daughter cold and terrified in a dark forest, I forced myself to keep myself anchored to my nephew's prattle about his vineyards and horses. 

I sat at my dresser, meaning to comb my hair to respectability, and gasped at the sight. My hair had turned white. The comb fell away from my hand. 

"What-" My voice was thin and unrecognizable, as I clasped at my hair in horror.

"Hush, Nolofinwë. It is nothing," Russandol said softly, bending to pick up the comb. 

It was jeweled and ornate, one of my brother's gifts to me sent during the years he had spent in Formenos. Furious, I grabbed the comb from Russandol's hand and flung it into the mirror, cracking it. The mirror had been one of my brother's gifts too. In the splintered faces of glass, my face was that of a demented beast. 

Russandol did not pick up the comb again. Instead he carefully used his fingers to comb my hair, to untangle it. The familiarity of his touch contrasted with the alienness of another touching me. Nobody had combed my hair in centuries. My brother had been the last to. 

"I hate him now," I confessed in a whisper and waited to be condemned for hating a dead man. 

Russandol's gaze met mine in the cracked mirror. There was only understanding. His fingers fumbled and he cursed then as his attempt at braiding failed. Sighing, he switched to merely pulling away my hair from my face with a plain band of leather. 

Who braided his hair? I wondered. He had never been comfortable to allow his valets to undertake those duties. 

"You look stately," he remarked. 

"I resemble that mariner," I retorted. 

I had no cause for vanity. It was hardly as if I wanted to draw anyone to my bed. I had not taken a lover since I had left Valinor. I doubted I would, until my death. Death was no longer an alien concept. I looked at the stark white of my hair. The Eldar were ageless and immortal, or so they said. The thralls that were let loose from the Enemy's prisons often wandered our lands with their backs stooped and their hair white. Stress and anguish, Artanis had judged. 

I looked at the mirror again, at my nephew. His hair remained dense, untamed. It had changed after the years of his imprisonment, from the mahogany of his grandfather to the blood crimson it had become. There were stray strands of grey, but they remained obscured by the profusion of his curls. He reasoned that his hair had changed from his years exposed to the sun and the elements, but he had not voiced a word of regret. 

Convalescing and weak, held intact only by Artanis's tonics of poppies and mandragora, shy of the physical changes wrought in him, he had still mustered the courage to come and kneel at my feet before our people and emissaries from other realms. The crown had been resplendent on his head, despite his long illness, and I had seen the King he was. 

The crown sat ill on my head. I had not worn the blasted ornament after his abdication and my coronation. 

I wondered how he lived with it. His regrets, when he voiced them, were as screams under whip and knife that my alcoholic son wielded. 

They had been searching for my daughter together. I would hear from our soldiers, I knew, about him screaming in my son's tent, about him limping away to his own tent in the middle of the night afterwards. Over the years, I had refrained, with difficulty, from ordering Macalaurë to return to his brother. Macalaurë had my brother's traits, selfish and strong-willed as he was, but he was the only one Russandol listened to. 

"I have not gone to Findekáno," my nephew said then, cutting into my thoughts easily. 

"No more," I entreated him, clasping his hand in mine, willing to beg for this, for an end to his madness seeking absolution at my son's hands. 

His fingers were stained by the purple of the mandragora flower, and they trembled in my grip. 

"No more," he promised, and the hue of his soft gaze reminded me of the ashes falling onto the Ice when my brother had set the ships on fire. 

* * *

I waited alone, as the messengers brought to me tales of rout, as they brought me news of deaths. Morgoth had unleashed dragons on the eastern front, they said. We had not faced a dragon before, any of us. 

On the western front, the Balrogs and their armies had advanced steadily into Hithlum, and they would be at the gates of Barad Eithel in two nights. 

"I am riding to the front," I declared. 

"Father, please!" Findekáno stumbled forward. There were dark circles about his eyes and he flinched at the clatter in our courtyard as our soldiers amassed. "You must remain! I can ride out."

"You can barely stand! You reek of wine!" I chastised Findekáno. 

He would be easy pickings if he rode out. He was- 

Turkáno was safe in his mountains. Artanis was safe with her husband's people. Russandol, if he had any sense at all, would have remained safe in his mountain fortress. I feared, however, that he would have led an army out. 

Findaráto was stranded away from his caves, and I feared for him. My son had assured me that Carnistro would arrive in time to bolster Findaráto's forces. 

From the rest, I had no word yet. There were only rumors of death and rout. 

"Send for my armor!" Findekáno barked at one of my attendants. 

"You cannot ride," I told Findekáno. He was drunk. He was drunk and I was a doddering fool that feared. 

"I saved your precious nephew without aid or army," he said tiredly. "Allow me to decide what I am capable of."

"Findekáno-" I swallowed. 

I had not called him by his name for many years. We had avoided each other as best as we could, ashamed of ourselves and of each other. We had not supped together. We had not attended court together. We had not ruled together. I had left him unprepared. He clung to his pursuits of inebriation and dalliances with all and sundry. I clung to my rule and administration. We had corresponded only when he sent me word to pay off one of the many women he had gotten with child. 

I despised him for what he had done to Russandol. I despised him for what he had done to Artanis in his insobriety. I despised him for the ruin he had wrought on himself, uncaring. I despised myself, for what manner of father was I to loathe his own child? 

He had remained under my roof. He had trained my armies. He had not fled east as my nephew had. He had not fled west as Turkáno had. He had not fled behind a girdle as Artanis had. He had not fled to caves as Findaráto had. He was all that remained to me, with me. 

Russandol had refused my offer to make him my heir. 

Findekáno, this son of mine, that I despised and feared for and loved, was the Crown Prince. I had not taught him to rule. 

"When we return, sup with me," I offered. 

He raised an eyebrow at my clumsy attempt to make amends. He donned his armor in silence, waving away his valet briskly. 

My brother had wrought our armor, long ago. 

We rode out together, and the sight cheered our weary soldiers. 

Findekáno was an excellent tactician and our men heeded him. He ordered a battalion to flank me, to take me back to the fortress should our lines falter. 

"I shan't hide!" I yelled at him, furious at his condescension.

He did not deign to reply to that. 

\-----

The Balrog chieftain I had faced before, during my first battle on the plains. Gothmog was his foul name.

My people had been easy pickings, weakened and hungry as we were from the Ice. We could not muster our warriors in time. We had children and women with us. 

Gothmog had roared exultant when he saw the state of us. We called forth a cavalcade as swiftly as we could. Findekáno had been fierce and true that day, and my heart sung in fearful pride to see his strength. 

Gothmog had not been impressed. His well-rested forces had started cutting down our men easily. Artanis had worn white that day, and she had been drenched to her knees in blood as she stood amidst our fallen soldiers working to ease their passing. 

Fortunately for us, Carnistro had led my brother's army to relieve us, to escort us to their encampments at the Lake Mithrim. I despised myself for hoping to see my brother, despite everything he had done to us. 

"If he were alive, I doubt he would have allowed us to ride to your aid, Nolofinwë," Carnistro had said quietly, steadying me when I wept at the news of my brother's death. 

Afterwards, there had been no time to mourn, to hate, to hope. 

Macalaurë had been entrusted with the rule in his brother's stead. Together, we had to raise fortresses and halls of healing, to feed and clothe and nurse our people, to send emissaries to the realms we knew of, to interrogate every thrall that was sent to us for news of Russandol. 

"Fingolfin, beloved to Varda!" Gothmog mocked me, as his trolls battered down our lines. 

I doubted I was beloved to Varda, to any of the Valar. The closest one of our family had come to the Gods had been when my brother had been on good terms with Aulë. His alliance with Morgoth I refused to think about. 

"Coward! Letting your minions fight for you!" I shouted back at the beast. 

He had slain my brother. 

Findekáno came riding to my side, muttering something about caution and self-preservation. 

"I bring you gifts, mighty King!" Gothmog crowed, and his goblins catapulted heads that landed at my stallion's forelegs. 

"Father!" Findekáno shouted, as I leapt off my horse. Gothmog was laughing, our people were frightened, and at my feet lay the heads of Angaráto and the Ambarussa. 

Angaráto had been the youngest of Arafinwë's children. Arafinwë had turned back to Tirion. He had implored me, he had implored my children and his, to return, to beg for the forgiveness of the Valar. And in the end, resigned, he had begged me to take care of his children for they had chosen to follow me. 

And the Ambarussa, my brother's last children. He had been sure that they would be girls. Nerdanel had tolerated his whimsy. Neither of them had been unhappy when they had sons again. Their hair was their mother's, brown and distinctive. They had been terrified when their father had made them swear the damned oath. I cradled the heads, with my gauntleted hands, and gathered them to my chest. I needed to bring them to Barad Eithel, to cremate them. 

Gothmog was saying something, and they catapulted again at his orders, and Findekáno cursed when entrails and limbs fell on me. 

"I made sure to gather all of them!" Gothmog called out, laughing. 

The lines broke as men screamed and deserted.

"Hold your place! Hold your place! To the King!" Findekáno shouted, in vain.

"I shall present you the Cave King next," Gothmog promised. "He will have fallen before the sun sets." 

Findekáno was trying to get me up. He was ordering me onto my horse, urgent and desperate.

\----

When I came to, I was in a tent, and I heard the sounds of battle raging outside. Cursing, I stumbled onto my feet, making for my sword. 

"Stop that!" Findekáno came to my side. He must have been keeping watch. He had a scroll in his hands, clenched tight. 

"Findaráto?" I demanded. 

"Atarinkë," he replied. "He is confident that he shall make it to Findaráto today. He expects that Carnistro must have arrived earlier to join forces with Findaráto's warriors. He also said that Barahir's people were mounting a valiant defense that he does not anticipate will be defeated." 

"Good," I said hoarsely, waving away the sheepskin of water he proffered. 

"He asks of the Ambarussa," he continued tiredly. 

"We did not cremate them," I blurted out. 

"Father, you must pull yourself together," Findekáno said gently. "We shall be overrun by noon tomorrow if the tide does not turn."

There were missives all about him, sorted neatly. There was a giant map he was poring over, marking and annotating tactics. My son was a warrior prince. Fëanáro had often remarked this, and rued that I disdained Findekáno's strengths and virtues. I did not trust my son with our family or the welfare of our people, but I trusted him with war. 

"What do you propose?" I asked.

If he was surprised by my willingness to listen, he did not exhibit it. He mulled a few long moments over that map of his, before saying quietly, "You should be sent to Turkáno. I shall make a stand here."

"To buy me time," I realized, and laughed until he came to me and slapped me back to sense.

"Pull yourself together!" He demanded, running a hand through his hair in frustration. "You are a liability to me here!"

"I am your father!" 

"You are my King," he corrected. "If you are taken, we will have lost everything." 

He sighed then, and patted my shoulder in sympathy, before saying in a softer tone, "Rest for an hour. Let me see to an escort and chart your route."

"I cannot leave you behind," I said, wishing that he did not have this doddering fool for a King. 

"I walked into Angband and survived." 

His hands were shaking, and he was shivering as if he were cold. His eyes were bloodshot and a perpetual frown decorated his brow as if he was ailing from a headache. His lips were chapped and he seemed weary in a way I had not seen him before.

In our haste to make for the front, he had not brought along a supply of alcohol. My poor child. Artanis had told me that to wean one away from the bottle, a gradual reduction was necessary, that a sudden cessation would lead to dangerous consequences. 

He must have deduced my line of thought easily, because he bristled.

"I require none of your pity," he muttered, refusing to meet my gaze. 

My poor child. My brother had doomed me and that I did not begrudge him. I could not forgive him for what he had done to our children. 

"I will be back in an hour," Findekáno told me. 

"Any news from Himring?" 

Findekáno did not reply, hesitant clearly to alarm me further.

"Tell me," I demanded. 

"He rode out to clear the pass of Aglon, to draw the dragons away from Macalaurë's retreat," Findekáno admitted. Seeing my naked fear, he hastened to add, "Maitimo has seen dragons before. He would know what to do."

"Ask them for a truce?" I retorted queasily. 

"You must pull yourself together," Findekáno said sharply. "Neither you nor I can do anything about the others. It is, however, in our power to see that the King is sent to safety. Let us see to that now." 

After he left, I fell into a tired stupor, and dreams awaited me. Gold and gore, red dew upon silver leaves, my niece and nephews slaughtered, my sons staked and left to rot until their bones were bleached white, Fëanáro holding his sword to my throat before our father's throne.  
  
I woke, panicking, struggling to breathe, and hastily ran out of the tent. Findekáno was with his seneschals. I swallowed and made for where our horses were penned in. 

Under the cover of the dark, in the distractions of the camp, I found my stallion. I rode as the wind, to Angband's gates.

My sword was wrought of Arda's ores. It was the last work of my brother's hands. The gem he had set in it was a crimson heartstone, and it blazed as my nephew's hair, as Findekáno's loyal heart, as the ships burning on the Ice, as Artanis's gown drenched in blood, as the red silks my daughter had loved donning. 

I summoned a God to single combat.

Morgoth wore on his crown the three gems that had cleaved our family apart. His sword was black and flames danced on it. His form was monstrous and my stallion reared in fright. I jumped off the spooked animal and let it flee. 

I made ready to die, and found myself calm. 

"You made a God bleed," Morgoth said quietly, driving his black sword into my lungs, watching me sputter blood for breath. He favored one leg over the other, for I had lopped his foot clean off at the ankle.

"I meant to make an example of you," he continued, over my rattling, wet gasps. The ichor from his wounds dripped onto me, burning skin and bone. 

"Pity you shan't last the hour." He sighed. "No matter. I shall burn you as comely as a goblin and send your corpse to Himring."

The Silmarilli were a bright halo about him, gentle and pure, and their coldness abated the pain of the flames he was burning me in. That my brother's jewels should bear none of his fierce passion for life! My organs were failing and I could not thread thoughts together anymore. Yet, instinctively, I knew what was wrong. 

Above us, an eagle soared. 

"I drained his fire from his jewels," Morgoth crowed, gouging my eyes out with his nails. 

I was blind, and yet I saw the light of the Silmarilli. 

The soulskeins wound taut through the power of the jewels was neither his nor my brother's. In the mists of life's end, I saw that grey flitted the shade of power.

"The doom of Mandos is upon you, High-King!" Morgoth declared, stabbing his sword into my gut.

A God bled, and he remained blind to the doom he wore on his brow.   


* * *

I woke to my brother peering at me, calling my name, beside a lake. 

"My dear Nolofinwë!" He exclaimed, bending to press his lips to my cheek, clasping my hands in his. 

When I closed my eyes, all I knew was the cold soulskeins in the Silmarilli on Morgoth's brow as he thrust his sword into my guts. 

"Let me help you up," my brother was saying. His grin was bright and his eyes were soft under grey skies. 

I struck his hand away and promptly fled without a second glance at him. I heard him calling after me. I hoped he had the sense not to pursue me. I could not be held responsible for what I might have done to him. 

I roamed over glen and glade, aimless, in haste, with the sole aim of evading pursuit. Finally, I came to a low valley, peaceful and quiet, on a riverbank. Hyssops and mandragora dotted the green. On the far bank were groves of cypress and alder. 

I lay down down on a clover field and watched the courtship dances of the dragonflies against grey skies. 

Oromë had forbidden men to lie with men in lust. In practice, as long as nobody flaunted their liaisons before Oromë, a blind eye was turned. Then they wanted to make an example of someone from our family due to our perceived godlessness, and I had been the easiest scapegoat because of my liaisons with men. There had been rumors swirling among emissaries from Valmar that the law would be enforced. Russandol had asked his father to build him a butterfly net. He had chased dragonflies on the plains of Tirion, and our people had watched him in tolerant amusement. Given that our grandfather brooded over a dead woman, and Fëanáro spent his days sooted and hammering away in a dark forge, and I was a profligate of unsurpassed notoriety, and Arafinwë spent tax gold recklessly on theatre, Russandol chasing after dragonflies did not worry our citizens. He had called for an audience with the Gods and had shown Oromë how male dragonflies mated with each other. If the Eldar were to be punished, then the dragonflies must be punished too, he held. If it was not in the nature of Eru's creations to lie with their own, as Oromë preached, then what had perverted the dragonflies? 

The law had been struck down. It had painted a target on his back. 

When I had gone to him afterwards, grateful, I had found him on the outskirts of Tirion, lying on clover fields, cloak and boots and butterfly net discarded by his side, watching dragonflies dance overhead. 

"I wish you had not made me promise," he had confessed softly. 

The promise I had demanded of him so that my brother might not take him away from me. He had been a frightened boy that clung to me, and I had been desperate to shield him from Fëanáro's wrath. He had sworn to me that he would only call Fëanáro _Father_. 

"What does it matter?" I had tried to placate him.

"It matters," he had replied, scowling. He had been even-tempered by nature that to see him sulk and mope had made me smile and then press a kiss to his brow. 

He had not mentioned it ever again, not when I had gathered the fragments of him into my arms after Findekáno had brought him home, not when he had knelt before me surrendering his crown, not when he had come to me with a horseshoe that was all that remained of my daughter. 

\--------  
  
I was shaken from my musings on the past, by my brother's plodding feet. I scowled up at him. I ought to scamper, but he was clearly set upon tracking me down. Fëanáro, whatever might be said of him, was not inconstant once he had made up his mind. 

"You cannot mean to spend the night here," he said, making an appeal to my pragmatism. 

"I mean to spend my night where you are not going to be," I told him plainly. 

Hurt flinched across his expressive face. Good. I wanted him to hurt and hurt and hurt, and it would be still nothing to what he had done to us with his hubris, madness, and folly. 

"It may not be safe," he insisted. 

"Look at the skies," I said flatly. "You and I know what that means. It is perfectly safe. Your son created this."

It had always hurt to acknowledge the child I had raised as his son. Masochistically, perhaps in the hopes that it would one day cease to sting, I had stuck to referring to him so. 

"Yes!" My brother puffed up in pride, like the oblivious, solipsistic popinjay he was. 

"However," he continued cautiously. "However, Nolofinwë, there may be unintended consequences. He was ill-prepared for an act of such magnitude. The power in the Silmarilli, undiluted Eru's light as it were, cannot be wielded by one of our kind. I could not bear to touch the power, even when I crafted the jewels." 

It had driven him insane. 

He paused, contemplating his next words carefully. 

"The complexity was overwhelming," he said vaguely, instead of admitting that he had lost his marbles and doomed us all.

"A stable creation, I suspect, requires the creator to survive," he continued. "Therefore, we must conclude that this creation is unstable."

I got to my feet and struck him. He gasped, clasped his cheek, and glared at me as if I had been the one to betray him. 

"Their fraternal bonds were not as ours," I said coldly. "If you think Findekáno or Artanis or any of the others would have allowed this to be without saving him, you continue to be stark raving mad, Fëanáro." 

I had stood on the Ice, as one brother burned the ships, as another turned back to safety. 

"The principles of light and chaos are governed by-"

I did not listen to him, instead focusing on the gurgling of the water fowl, and the song of the breeze in the willows. 

He was the scientist. He questioned anything and everything unless he had been the one to create. He did not know how to have faith in the unprovable, in the unfathomable, in the unseen. 

"So even if they had wanted to, Nolofinwë, they simply could not have done anything, without being scattered into nonexistence and consumed by the primordial chaos," he finished. "It is an impossibility."

Findekáno had walked into Angband with a harp. I had made a God bleed. When Morgoth had slaughtered me, I had seen what he had not. I had seen the destiny that sat bright on his bejeweled brow. 

"What did you come to me for?" I asked Fëanáro. 

"I built a shelter," he said awkwardly. "You may wish to spend the night there." He cleared his throat and continued, "It will be warm. Even if you think this place safe, it shall set my mind at rest if you were surrounded by four walls." 

"Lead on," I told my brother. I had no stomach to argue with him all night long. 

I might end up killing him if we spoke of the past.   
  
\--------------

More numbers woke by the lake. 

His children, the youngest five, who had dutifully sworn the oath at his urging, no longer called him father. They came to me when they needed anything. They had easily fallen into their ways of old in the company of their cousins. 

Irissë, laughing and dancing and hunting with Tyelko, was balm to my heart. Whenever she rode out, I waited, antsy, in our courtyard, until she returned. To my great relief, she did not ride out anymore without Tyelko by her side. Tyelko was terrified of taking his eyes away from her, as if she might vanish into the ether if he dared to. 

Tyelko and Irissë were often the ones to find those who had woken by the lake. They brought Findaráto to me. Then they brought Angaráto. Then they brought Telpë and a man I had not seen before. 

"Ereinion Gil-Galad," Telpë introduced him. "The last and greatest of the High-Kings on Arda." 

Ereinion. 

Russandol had wept and woken screaming this name during the early nights of his recovery. Macalaurë had sung him to sleep tirelessly. Artanis had smuggled in opiates concocted of poppies and mandragora whenever she could, to allow Russandol to sleep without his nightmares. 

Ereinion had my son's face and form. 

How many women in Barad Eithel had Findekáno impregnated in his trysts? I had paid them off, whenever it was brought to my attention. Most women had chosen to rid themselves of what grew in their womb. We needed an heir, not bastards running about. Besides, even if I was willing to pay for their welfare and education, Findekáno had adamantly refused to claim and name any of them. 

"A worthy name," I told my grandson, moving forward to embrace this man who wore my son's face. 

"Lord Maedhros named me," Ereinion said awkwardly, having none of Findekáno's natural charm. He reminded me of Fëanáro then, ill-suited to court and spectacle.

The subtext was evident. My nephew had named and crowned a bastard Findekáno had not wanted. I could see Fëanáro's scandalized face across the hall. I bit back a grin. The last time he had been so aghast had been when Findaráto had regaled us with tales from his palace of caves. Fëanáro could not fathom why anyone would wish to live in a cave.

My brother railed against the impossible, without knowing what it truly meant. 

He and I avoided each other as best as we could, in silent accord. He stuck to his forge, to his occasional conversations with our children, but kept to himself for the most part. His sons and niece and nephews avoided him too, suspicious whenever he made suggestions. How could I fault them for it? 

He retreated into his shell and I saw little of him. Telpë, on occasion, urged him to come to our dinner table, but he would hastily take his leave after eating, without lingering for the long conversations that ran up and down our table. 

"Perhaps you should talk to him," I told Atarinkë. He had been the closest to his father. 

"I have not forgiven him," he replied plainly. "I doubt I ever shall, uncle." 

Atarinkë's wife had been struck down at the docks. There had been no time to cremate her. Later, he had told me that he hoped the Teleri of Alqualondë might have granted her that final kindness of a funeral. 

\------ 

"Irissë sent word!" Findaráto exclaimed, barging in to our dining chamber. "They found Findekáno and Artanis by the lake! They have Russandol with them, but he does not remember anything of our past. Artanis wants us to let him be."

There they were. Artanis, my brave and brilliant Artanis, who had torn open the Void and slain Irmo. My son, flawed and fierce, loyal to the end, wearing fate and heart's bruises with unflinching honesty. Russandol, the child I had raised as mine, until my brother had taken him away with oath and burning sails. 

Only Macalaurë remained. Russandol would have seen to his brother's future resolutely. I did not need to worry anymore. The rest were here. I sighed in relief. 

"This cannot be!" Fëanáro exclaimed, pacing, as he absently calculated the consequences. 

"I shall leave you to contemplate impossibilities," I told my brother cheerfully. "I have a reception to arrange."

"May I assist you?" He asked me then, and promptly began making excuses to be elsewhere when all of us stared at him in shock. 

He and I had avoided each other in silent accord. I had heard him pacing in the corridor outside my quarters, but he had not dared to knock. I had seen him watch me from afar at dinners when he bothered to make himself present. 

I bit off the refusal that came to my lips. Help was burning ships in the east, help was him threatening to take away a boy from me, help was him dying and leaving me to mourn and hold us together, help was him running away in the morning from my bed ashamed and alarmed. 

He had loved me too, but that had been of little consequence in the end. 

"I have been struggling with a necklace I was crafting to welcome Artanis," Telpë said mildly. "The faces of the jewel does not catch the light as I would desire. I suspect I made a mistake in calculating its refraction. Could I beg you to look at it for me, please?" 

"Of course," Fëanáro replied quietly, still holding my gaze. The hurt was evident, and it cured nothing. 

Telpë did not call him grandfather anymore. 

\-------

"Father!" Findekáno was laughing as he followed Irissë and Tyelko into our courtyard where we waited for them in barely suppressed excitement and joy. 

He had not left me, even when the others had. He had stayed by my side, though neither of us had respected each other. A drunk and a dotard, and all that we had held unforgiven between us. 

Unlike my brother, I had learned from my mistakes. I opened my arms to my son, and he came to me easily, forgiving, true of heart. 

"I have always brought to you the best of gifts," he said cheerfully, turning about to drag Russandol to me. 

He was happy and unburdened by memory, eyes lambent in curiosity as he took in our family. He looked to Findekáno for introductions. 

Findekáno hesitated, looking to me. I saw what he was dithering over. This was a chance, undeserved, to start anew. My brother could not take him away from me anymore, if I wished it so. Fëanáro's mien was pale and resolute as he watched us. 

"My darling boy," I greeted Russandol softly. "You are home now."

I wondered if it might disturb him to be embraced by a stranger he did not know, but his eyes were full of mischief and knowing as he embraced me. 

"He has adapted remarkably well," Findekáno said wryly. "I blame Artanis and her narrations of our tales over daisy chains."

"I shall have you know that the art of chaining daisies requires brilliance, cousin!" Artanis said lightly, coming to us. 

Russandol stepped away so that I could take my dear niece into my arms. She sighed and placed her head on my chest. 

"No more, Nolofinwë," she said, exhausted, hopeful, trusting. 

Telpë and Ereinion had told me of what she had become, an enduring shadow that refused to fade. And yet, the miracle that she was, looked up at me with hope that all would be well from this day onwards. 

"No more," I promised her.   
  
\---------------

"You must be weary," Russandol said, standing at the threshold of the little chamber where I worked on the accounts of our household. 

"You must be at loose ends," I teased him, beckoning him in. "Shall I set you to tally milk and meat?"

"I shan't mind," he replied, settling onto the window seat and pulling a sheaf of parchment to him. 

We worked together until twilight, only the scratch of our quills keeping us company. I set aside my books and walked to him, suppressing a grin at the shorthand he employed. I had taught him that once. 

"Passable," I declared. "I might keep you around as my clerk."

"Your grace awes me," he replied, laughing, looking up at me with eyes bright and warm. 

He wore a tunic of blue, silken and embroidered, that became him unusually well. Findaráto had gifted him the tunic from one of the villages. It had become a favorite of his, and he wore it often. Blue had been a color he had favored, before we had come to Arda. Then he had retreated to greys and blacks, ever in mourning. The only blue that had marked him afterwards had been the stain of the mandragora. 

Oblivion suited him, I thought to myself, and applauded Artanis once again for her cleverness. 

"You watch me as if I might court trouble left to myself," he complained. 

"You sent my hair white with all the trouble you brought to my doorstep," I muttered, placing a kiss to his brow. 

"He spoke to me today."

Fëanáro. Fëanáro had not dared speak to his sons that remembered, to his brother or nieces or nephews that remembered. Clever man that he was, he had taken himself to Russandol first. I bristled at the gall of him. He was a careless speaker. What if he had impulsively said anything to Russandol that he was ill-prepared to understand? 

"What did my brother want?" 

"Nothing. He showed me his forge. He offered to craft me anything that I desired," Russandol replied, watching me carefully. 

My brother was resorting to bribery, was he? 

"He avoids you."

Artanis should have done away with Russandol's perceptiveness too, I thought, scowling. 

"What is wrong?" Russandol urged. "I could help."

The last time he had helped, the Silmarilli, soul-skeined, had embraced me in death. I did not tell him what I thought of his schemes. 

"I anoint you my clerk," I said, jesting, striving to change the subject. "That is all I need from you."

\-----

Findekáno brought a guest to dinner. 

"Húrin!" Turkáno exclaimed, rising to his feet rapidly, running to the handsome, short man that accompanied Findekáno and Irissë. "Húrin!" 

He shifted awkwardly, fretting, his natural introversion catching up to his enthusiasm upon seeing his friend. 

"Mine!" Artanis said cheerfully, embracing the man before Turkáno could bring himself to.

"He was my friend first!" Turkáno protested. 

"I was his last friend!" Artanis retorted, morbid as ever.   
  
Húrin was laughing as he embraced them both. 

Húrin of Dor-lómin. My sons and nephews had spoken fervently of his valor, of how he had sacrificed himself to save them in the last war for Beleriand. Turkáno, shy to seek company outside our family, had called this man a friend. 

Short of stature, he seemed a far cry from the undefeated warrior they had painted him to be. 

"Come, let me introduce you to my father!" Findekáno urged, bringing Húrin to my side. 

The Edain's eyes were on Russandol who sat beside me. He must have known my nephew. Throughout the dinner, I noticed how he hearkened to Turkáno and Artanis, how he bantered with Findekáno and Tyelko. They must have all respected him deeply. 

"An unusual stature for a warrior," I commented to Russandol. 

"He is handsome," Russandol said, and the curiosity in his gaze was one I knew well, even if I had not seen him look at another so. I suppressed a grin. 

"Nursing an infatuation, are we?" I teased him. 

"Is it an infatuation if I mean to seduce him?" He wondered, making me choke on my wine. 

Fëanáro, sitting to my left, turned in concern towards us, and helpfully poured me a glass of water. His considerate manners made me scowl at him. There was turning a new leaf, and there was this stranger that had replaced my brother. 

"All is well," Russandol said reassuringly. He gestured to the full flute of wine at Fëanáro's side. "Is the wine not to your taste?" 

"He does not prefer dry reds," I said absently, before I realized that my brother was staring at me wide-eyed. 

"I wonder if we could temper the dryness," Russandol said, deep in thought. "In theory, we could bleed the juice from the skins, and perhaps store it in an unadulterated steel container instead of wood."

Fëanáro and I let him prattle on and carefully avoided each other's gaze. 

\--------

That night, as I made to retire, I saw my brother at the door to my quarters, thin-lipped and pale. 

"I need to speak to you," Fëanáro said softly. 

I hesitated. The last time he had come begging to me, I had trusted him, and promised him everything in my power, and he had turned me a kinslayer before stranding me on the Ice. 

"Nolofinwë," he entreated, voice trembling, holding my gaze despite the terror evident on his face. 

I nodded and allowed him entry. 

I sat down in my armchair before the hearth and waved him to the empty one across me. He shook his head, pacing before me, restless and frenetic, wringing his hands and clutching his hair in turns. I had once looked at bluejays and seen him, in their ceaseless fluttering about. 

We had taught the children to stone birds that first winter by the Mithrim, when our stores had run low, when we had no horses left to cull for meat. _Better that they learn to eat birds than each other_ , Macalaurë had said with his usual pragmatism. 

Fëanáro came to a standstill, and faced me. Seeing that I would not be the first to speak, he nodded, licked his lips nervously, and began. 

"I need you," he said steadily.

I had needed him too. 

"Is that what you told your children, brother?" 

He shook his head. 

We fell silent, with only the crackling sound of logs in the fire disturbing the quiet. 

"Nolofinwë, please," he whispered. "You have always-"

I had always taken him back. I had always forgiven. I had always given him everything I was. A man in love is a foolish man. I had been one too. I had taken him into my bed and showed him my heart, and he had run away to Nerdanel in the morning. He had come back, and I had had no words of reproach for him. 

"I was not in my right mind," he began furiously. "You know this! You must not hold it against me, Nolofinwë. I cannot bear it!"

I clenched my fists so that I might not strike him. If I closed my eyes, I could smell the ashes in the air and our children coughing. If I closed my eyes, I could feel the bitter cold of the Helcaraxë in my bones. If I closed my eyes, I could see Findekáno drinking his way through grief and Russandol keeping a solitary watch on his barren mountain held to life by mandragora and poppies and the sacrifices a woman had made in Angband to have him spared, Artanis fleeing to Doriath and Findaráto battling Sauron in a tower of song. If I closed my eyes, I could see Turkáno driven mad by loneliness and Irissë lost in a dark forest. 

Long ago, as I stood over corpses, as I watched the ships sail away, Nerdanel had come to me, begging me to protect her children from their father's madness. 

"Forgive him, for he is not in his right mind," I had entreated her, on my brother's behalf. 

"I cannot forgive him when he harms my children," she had said vehemently. She had placed her work-calloused hands on my bloodstained gloves and said, "I suspect that neither can you."

My brother came to stand before me, and took my hands in his, drawing me away from my memories. His hands covered mine perfectly, and I had once thought we were halves of a whole. 

"They will not forgive me unless you do," he said, pained. 

"They have fought monsters and raised mighty kingdoms, without my handholding," I said sharply. "They hardly need me to endorse you to change their minds about you, brother. If they are loathe to seek your company, perhaps you ought to contemplate what might have caused their reluctance. I assure you that I did not poison their minds against you."

"I seek their approval so that it might compel you to tolerate me. I will leave if you demand it of me," Fëanáro said abruptly. I brought my hand to my chest, to allay the sharp burst of pain I knew. "I stay for you, in the hope that one day you might forgive me."  
  
"There is no cause to leave," I said, and despised how thin my voice was, and despised how my heart unclenched in relief when he nodded assent. 

"You are my brother. You have a place under this roof," I continued. 

He sighed and pressed his knuckles to his mouth, as if to stifle a sob. I hoped, for my sake, that he would not weep. I could not trust myself not to go to him then. 

"Leave them be," I said carefully. 

I might be chronically inflicted by my foolhardy heart's whimsy, but I refused to allow it sway when I had a family to protect. 

"I have made my peace with it," he murmured, wiping his eyes fiercely with the back of his hand. "I was a terrible father. I shan't attempt to reclaim that privilege, Nolofinwë." He cleared his throat, and admitted, "You were a better father. You are a better father, to all of them. Will you permit me to make amends to them?"

I shook my head, frightened by the prospect of him attempting amends and sending them spiraling into old traumas. I refused to admit that I was frightened he might succeed, that I might lose them all to him once again. 

"Very well," he said bravely, putting on a stoic facade I easily saw through. "What am I allowed of you?"

"What do you want from me?" I barked. "You have only come to me when you had no alternatives, brother." 

"I love you," he said wearily. Before I could begin to heap scorn on what he considered love, he waved me off, saying, "It is inconsequential now. I understand that. I shall settle for as much or as little as you grant me, Nolofinwë."

The greedy beast in my chest roared in exultation. I scowled. How badly had I once wanted him to admit that he needed? It was inconsequential in our present, as he noted. 

What could he have of me? I did not want him gone. I did not want him attempting to reclaim our family. 

"Perhaps we may meet here in the evenings," I suggested. 

He worked in the forge until late into the night. Once, he would have balked at any demands upon his time devoted to craft. 

He made no protest and nodded acquiescence. 

\-----------

Russandol was humming merrily as he worked. Was he doodling in the margins? I rapped his knuckles. 

"It is a lovely day outside, isn't it?" He sighed. 

"Go out, then," I muttered, returning to my brown study. "Artanis wanted oysters, as it were. Fish her some." 

"Artanis has never not wanted oysters," he replied. 

There was the mark of teeth on the apple of his throat. That, with his unusual distractedness as he worked, was enough to tell me everything. 

"Slept with Turkáno's best friend, I see," I teased him. 

"I hope to do so again," he murmured, refusing to meet my gaze, blush high on his cheekbones. 

Macalaurë would have poor Húrin's guts for garters. For Húrin's sake, I hoped this was a passing infatuation. 

"I know little of this," Russandol said softly. "I hope he doesn't find my ignorance tiresome."

He had often confided only in me of his uncertainties and insecurities. I suppressed a smile at this trust of old, even in lethe. 

"I doubt he shall be the first to tire, in your tryst. He drinks in the sight of you as parched soil awaiting rain," I said reassuringly. 

He flashed me a bright grin and returned to his work. Darling boy, I thought fondly, as he broke into a smile every now and then. I had never seen him so utterly besmitten. It suited him. 

"Stop teasing me," he muttered. 

"I said not a word!" I protested. 

"You did not need to!" 

He looked up, and then asked softly, "You have been morose for weeks. How are matters with him?" 

"I don't know him anymore." I sighed. 

"I don't know anyone anymore at all," Russandol said placidly. "And I did not know that I had known once." 

"Oh, you could be a stranger we have deluded thoroughly with our fantastical tale of gods and dragons," I mused. 

"I like the goblins the best in this tale of yours. They stink of rotten fish and are easy to kill, according to Findaráto," he said cheerfully. "If this history of ours is a fictional creation set to delude me, you ought to give up accounting and start writing." 

I had kept a journal. I wondered what had become of it. 

"You were confiding in me your darkest worries," my pesky companion continued. 

"I was not," I said half-heartedly. "There is nothing to confide. He shows up at the door to my quarters every evening past supper, as clockwork. We make polite conversation over tea and scones. Then I send him away before I retire."  
  
I ought to make my way to the villages nearby and sleep with a random stranger to clear my head. The more I entertained the idea, the more it appealed to me. I had not slept with anyone after my brother had made the Silmarilli and promptly taken leave of his senses. 

What I needed was a tryst. Time to take a page from Russandol's book. Or perhaps Findaráto's. He hosted orgies in the stables, much to the dismay of our stablehands. 

"You have a wicked look to you now," Russandol commented. 

"Contemplating if we should have turkey or duck for dinner tomorrow." 

He raised an eyebrow and returned to his work. 

\-----------------

"What are you doing here, uncle?" Findaráto hissed, when he saw me at the tavern. 

I had come incognito, in my plainest clothes, with neither ornamentation nor armor. Findaráto, shameless thing he was, was attired in fine robes and wore a necklace of green that matched his eyes. His hair was artfully tousled and he smelled of perfume. 

"Race you to the barkeep," I told him wickedly. 

"Pirate! That one is mine! I have been wooing him for weeks!"

My seduction was rusty, but I was a charming rascal when I needed to be, and Findaráto scowled at me before beating a retreat when he saw the barkeep's hand on my shoulder. 

I took the man in the alley behind, and he screamed the false name I had given him. His arse was tight and his nails clawed my back just as I preferred. He exhorted me for more and praised me lavishly. 

I preened under his breathless praise and pleasured him thoroughly until he came twice at the business end of my cock..

I stayed at the pub for a drink afterwards, winking at the barkeep when he moved stiffly. The flush on his face was telling. His patrons leered and winked at me. 

"Find another pub!" Findaráto hissed, dropping into a seat beside me, stealing my beer and slurping of it. "This is my haunt!"

"Every pub is your haunt," I said mildly. My head was clear for the first time in ages. I had needed a tryst badly indeed.

"Uncle!" Findaráto muttered, displeased, crossing his arms over his chest. 

He resembled a tawny kitten that Irissë had once brought home despite my protestations. It had run off to my brother's forge, tripped into the open fires, and by the time my panicked brother had managed to extricate it, it had been as dead as meat on a skewer. Irissë had lost her penchant for pets afterwards. Macalaurë, pragmatic, had said that we might roast game in the forge instead of toiling to build large bonfires outside. 

"Russandol has become better at tax policy after he began his tryst," I told Findaráto. "I cannot allow him to outdo me on policy!"

"Russandol thinks he is trysting," Findaráto said dryly. "He is incapable of buggery without a side of love." 

"Don't ruin my post coital bliss with dire statements," I told my dear nephew, and we settled in for a night of drinking and laughter.  
  
We wound our way back, giggling and happy, singing merrily old and bawdy lays of Tirion, only to find the household in uproar. 

"We should stay the night in the stables," Findaráto said warily, as we winced at the shouting and the screaming carried through the windows to the gardens. 

"I am a responsible parent," I muttered. "I must go and make peace."

"You buggered my barkeep in a back alley," Findaráto retorted. "A good parent would have left the barkeep to me."

"He wasn't good enough for you." I pointed him to the balcony of Artanis's chambers, with a convenient trellis beside it. "Catch some sleep if you can. Let me investigate."

"I am not leaving you alone," Findaráto said, abruptly sober. "If it is Irissë and Tyelko fighting, they will have knives." 

Irissë had weaponized candlesticks and chairs during her last argument with Tyelko. I had no desire to see her brandishing knives. 

\---------

The scene that greeted me made me gasp. Findekáno was trying to restrain my brother, who was panicking and _in armor_. When had he made himself a suit of armor? The last time I had seen him as affected, he had been declaring vengeance on Morgoth for our father's murder. Lightheaded, I clutched Findaráto's hand for balance. 

Findaráto was speaking to me, but words moved as through water, and I heard only distorted sounds. 

"Step away from my son," I said weakly. 

My eyesight was flickering. The smoke from the burning sails had hindered our visibility. Many had stepped on thin ice and perished. 

"It is all right," Findekáno said soothingly, and I wondered if he was trying to convince my brother or me. "Fëanáro was merely worried that something had befallen you. He had waited for you in your quarters for a few hours, and was concerned when nobody knew where you might be."

"Concerned?" I spluttered. "He is in full armor!"

"Brother," Fëanáro began, pale and frightened. "Nobody could tell me where you were." 

"Sit down," Findaráto was telling me, and led me to the chaise. "We can discuss this as the civilized family we are, can't we?" 

"Off with that armor," I insisted. "We are not discussing anything until the armor is gone! When did you build it? Why did you build it, brother? What manner of beast were you hoping to slay? Why must you hold to paranoia as a starving dog to a bone?" I was screaming, I realized, and Findaráto was hushing me. 

So much for my postcoital bliss. 

Findekáno sighed and made to help Fëanáro to remove the armor. My brother assisted him swiftly, silently, not uttering a word to my barrage of questions. When they had set the metal and leather aside, I exhaled in relief and massaged my brows in vain to stay the crippling headache that abruptly beset me.

"If something had happened to me, what would you have done?" I demanded. 

"Nolofinwë-"

"I need to know!" 

"I would have killed! Is that what you wanted to know?" Fëanáro shouted at me. "I would have killed and not a shadow of regret would have crossed my mind for it. You are all that I have! If I cannot save you, I will avenge you."

"We are safe here," Findekáno said comfortingly. 

"No, we are not! If I am willing to kill, so many others must be too! There is no perfect creation, Findekáno! There never was! We are beasts, you and I and all of us, desperate, clawing to possess, killing to claim! This is in our nature! It cannot be undone!"

After his impassioned words, he collapsed in on himself, and slid down the wall to the floor, and buried his face in his hands. 

"Findaráto, Findekáno, leave us," I said hastily, stricken, when he began weeping inconsolably. 

After they had left, with wary glances at the pair of us, I made my way to my brother and sat down beside him, wishing that my pounding headache would abate for the unpleasant conversation that beckoned. I ran a hand over the knobs of his spine and held him when he clung to me sobbing. 

"You are the only one mad enough to don armor and sword," I said flatly. "Put that on again under this roof and I shall have you tossed to the streets."

"You cannot know!" He wailed. "You cannot know how I feared when I could not find you anywhere! I thought-" he hiccuped, trying to wrest words to order. "I thought you were taken! I burned the ships to save you! I came east and saw only darkness and grief, and I wanted none of it to touch you!" 

"You took your children with you," I said angrily. "How was I to leave them to this darkness and grief you wanted to spare me from?" 

"They were my children," he said, wiping his face, only to fall into sobs again. 

"They were my family too." 

"You have them now," he replied quietly, woebegone. "I have lost them all." Then, in a trembling tone, he said, "I cannot lose you."

"If your first reaction was to pick up a sword and garb yourself in armor, I shall gladly hand you my leash for the safety of our people," I muttered, taking the edge of my sleeves and wiping his face. 

He sighed and pressed a kiss to the corner of my lips, seeking. Exhausted, stripped of rational thought by my pounding headache, I let him take my mouth, and the taste of him was as an old song of home. I dragged him into my lap and kissed him until his fingers were tugging at my sleeves and collar to get to skin. His hands were as gyves on me, and the black of his eyes flared open in need was a siren song to the rising lust in my blood.   
  
"Not here," he said, when I dropped my hand to the laces of his trousers. 

I stuffed his mouth with fingers to shut him up. His cock was full and leapt into my fist as his back arched in offering. He had always given himself over to pleasure with abandon. I licked my palm and stroked him rough, as I remembered he liked, and the rattling gasps he made through clenched teeth proved my memories right. He must have sensed my smugness, because he bit the fingers in his mouth, none too gentle, and his hands came to open the folds of my robes. I was hard, despite my liaison of earlier, and he cursed when his hand came away smeared with spend. 

"That is where you were then," he said, shocked, staring at the evidence on his hand as if betrayed. 

"We were hardly lovers!" 

"A stranger then! You were buggering strangers while I tore down our home searching for you, alarmed that you might have been taken by our enemies!"

"There are no enemies here, you paranoid bastard!" 

"You are mine," he said then, sidestepping my accusations of paranoia. 

"I am bloody well not yours!" 

He bit my lips for that, and his hands came to hold mine to the wall, before he lined himself to take me. The expression of fierce focus on his face made my heart clench as I remembered the first time he had done this, under our father's roof in Tirion. He had been curious and desiring, inexperienced and impatient. 

"You could hurt yourself," I said gently. "Let me."

"You are mine," he said, eyes flashing fierce and possessive, and he was no longer a stranger to me. He rode me hard, cupping my mouth to stifle my gasps and screams, unrelenting in his up and down, and when he came, he came on my chest and stomach, on my robes, leaving me marked and his. 

"You are mine," he reiterated, as I gasped to catch my breath, wrung dry by him. 

My headache had worsened significantly. 

"You are exhausting," I muttered, batting his hands away from where he was smearing his seed into my skin. "Get up. The maids will be raise a ruckus if they happen upon us." 

"The next time your cock wanders into a stranger's arse, I will leash it," he threatened. 

"Delightful," I professed, kissing him once again. I was unable to stop kissing him once I had begun. "Get rid of your armor. Stop scaring my children with your paranoia. Then we can consider terms."

He waited, wide-eyed and hopeful. 

Two orgasms in a matter of hours had stripped me of my defenses. 

"Very well," I allowed. "The next time I fancy a barkeep, I shall come to you instead."

He kissed and pleaded his way into my bed, taking advantage of my exhaustion and the headache that dug nails into my eyes. 

\----------------

  
"Nolofinwë!" 

I woke alone. My brother had not changed in this, in fleeing my bed in the mornings without a backwards glance. I scowled. 

"I come!" I yelled at my nephew, before he had the bright idea to break in. 

He took in the sight of me before chortling. I forgave the pesky nuisance since he carried a platter of tea and food. 

"I spent the morning consoling our maids. They came to find the aftermath in the library."

"I am sure they were consoled by your attentions," I muttered, wincing when he opened the windows. The cloying scent of the dratted white roses he insisted on growing wafted in. I looked to my tea for sanity.

At least, he had brought scones. I selected an apricot scone and dunked it into the cream he had thoughtfully fetched. He was jovial as he prattled on, laughter lurking in his every word, but I forgave him since he was setting my chamber to rights as best as he could. He must mean to spare the maids another breakdown. 

"Oh, there is a letter on your pillow," he remarked, pausing in his efforts to make the bed. 

"Give it here!" I demanded, rising with my cup of precious tea. 

"I can read it to you," he offered, laughing openly at my exasperation. 

"Give it here. Who knows what he has written? I fucked my brother after I fucked the barkeep Findaráto wanted to drag to an orgy," I said wryly.

Russandol doubled over in helpless laughter. He ought to be dismayed by my profligacy. Had I raised him to accept my vices? I missed Arafinwë and his occasional outburst of moral code, not that it seemed to have been inculcated in any of his children. 

"Stop thinking!" Russandol said, wiping away his tears of hilarity. "Your tea shall go cold. I refuse to venture down to the kitchens for another pot." 

"Read the letter," I ordered him nervously. 

He came to sit beside me and placed a reassuring hand on my knee, seeing easily through my facade. 

When he unfurled the scroll, his eyebrows shot up. 

"Well?"

" _I have a pressing task to undertake today and must leave your bed in haste. I promised you a leash and must rush to craft it for you._ " 

"Stop that," I told the cackling beast beside me, dragging the scroll from him to read the blasted words. "You are carrying on with your little warrior in broad daylight." 

"Húrin is mighty," he corrected me, quick to leap to his lover's defense. "He was Arda's greatest warrior!" 

"What has that to do with any of your pursuits together?" I wondered, thrown off for a moment. 

"I am the truculent goblin he takes prisoner," Russandol said merrily, leaping out of my reach when I batted at him with the scroll I held. 

I dressed for the day, and sighed when Russandol came to comb my hair into order. 

"I dreamed that your hair was white," he murmured, braiding my hair deftly. 

Artanis had promised me that he would not remember anything in coherence, that imprints or impressions would be all that returned to him. I trusted her. And yet, hearing him make these remarks of the past frightened me. 

"Nolofinwë?" 

"My hair turned white in a matter of days," I said quietly. I caught his hands in mine and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. "I am glad that you have forgotten, my darling boy."

\------------

My brother wore braces over his tunic frequently, tethering various tools and quills to the waistband of his trousers as he flitted about from station to station. When he came to dinner one night straight from the forge, I noticed a leash looped casually and tied to his waistband, beside his keyring and quills and gloves. 

"Have you been ferrying that about?" I hissed at him. 

"I promised," he reminded me, and had the gall to look particularly pleased with himself.

I ought to bar him from my chambers, to teach him that he had no claim on me. We were not lovers. That he came to me every night, that we spoke by the hearth and then migrated into my bed, was mere happenstance. 

It could happen to anyone. 

"You are wearing your mask of denial again," Russandol mentioned. 

He was neatly deboning his fish with surgical precision. Artanis must have taught him. Sure enough, she winked at me, seeing what I scowled at. 

"What if I needed an assistant?" She explained.

"He is my assistant," I retorted. "My clerical miracle."

"Húrin calls me a miracle too, on occasion," Russandol said dreamily. 

"Does he call you that before or after he has washed you in his pig's trough?" Irissë teased him. 

"He doesn't keep pigs," Russandol explained, with the patience of one who had explained this many a time. "He has the trough because it is a long walk to the well, and he has not yet pruned the nettle bushes surrounding it, and neither of us enjoy drawing pailfuls when it is freezing in the mornings. The trough is a contraption of convenience." 

"Does he live in a hovel?" I asked, worried. "Should we offer him a place here?"

"Yes, please!" Turkáno exclaimed. 

"Yes!" Artanis chimed in. "The quarters near mine are empty." 

"That is for Macalaurë," I said distractedly. 

"Húrin prefers his hillside," Russandol interrupted our plans to bring his swain home. "He is content there. He likes his quiet."

"I cannot fathom why," Fëanáro said dryly. Seeing my scowl, he amended, "Húrin lives on a hill, overlooking the plains. He has fields and vineyards and poultry. There are villages close by if he chooses to seek company. I doubt he is unhappy, brother."

I fretted over Russandol's tendency to ride alone to Húrin at whim. What if he found himself lost, as my Irissë once had? What if an impression of old surfaced in his mind, and left him unmoored? What if he lost control of his mount and fell, breaking his limbs or spine or neck? 

"I mean to see this hillside abode for myself," I declared.

"Father, it shan't be to your liking," Findekáno muttered. "It is a tad rustic for your tastes."

What manner of barn was Russandol living in these days? I scowled at him, irked by his penchant for seeking trouble. Why couldn't he bed a barkeep as the rest of us did when we fancied a tryst? 

\---------

My face must have portrayed my dismay faithfully, because Findekáno burst into laughter. 

"This is a hovel," I hissed at him. "Your friend lives in a hovel and you have not acted to liberate him!"

"He was Arda's greatest warrior. He hardly needs me to liberate him," Findekáno said cheerfully, leading me up the narrow stone-cut path to the homestead. 

"Lord Fingolfin! I am honored to receive you!" 

Húrin came bustling to greet us, bright-eyed and clad in a ploughman's attire, brown and drab, covered to the knees and to the elbows in dust and mud. Russandol spent hours mulling over the cut and drape of fabric. What did he see in Arda's greatest warrior? 

Findekáno had bounded up the steps to embrace his friend, unheedful of the state of him. Húrin made his way to that infamous trough and washed his hands, chatting away easily to Findekáno through his ablutions. 

I sighed and followed them inside. There were only two rooms. A cot took the place of prominence in the first. Then there was a kitchen with a table that was not level. I could see the larder beyond. 

Húrin led us to the kitchen and set about to making us tea. 

"Can you fetch the basket of gourds I left outside?" He asked Fingon. "Artanis demanded pickles." 

"Artanis is as Ungoliant. Once you start feeding her, she shall haunt you evermore," Findekáno warned him, before setting out. 

The scones served with the tea were of apricot, and I knew where the fruit had come from. The mismatched china told me a tale too. There was the fine stoneware and ceramic that Russandol preferred, mixed among the sturdy earthen, copper, and iron vessels of the homestead. On the cot, I espied articles of fine linen and silk scattered about, amidst the eminently functional clothing my host favored. 

Russandol may be quick to trust, but Húrin remembered everything, and his life had been a cruel one. He would not have easily welcomed a stranger into his home, into his bed, into cohabitation. 

"You were his lover," I blurted out awkwardly and realized why Fëanáro had warned me from traveling to this homestead. Fëanáro must have deduced the same. 

"A summer's tryst, when I had been a lad," Húrin said quietly. "What is a few months to the Eldar?" 

"A blink of an eye," I concurred. "Does he know?"

"He was quick to suspect it," Húrin said laughing, sitting across me at the uneven table. "Worry not, Lord Fingolfin. I shan't bring him to harm."

The last time my brother had promised me that, he had promptly died in a blazing spectacle of glorious defiance, and left me to pick up the pieces. 

"Come stay with us," I offered. Honesty served to persuade warriors, or so Artanis held. "I worry about his long rides alone. I would prefer that he remained closer to home."

"There is nothing in this creation that can bring harm to him," he said solemnly. 

I knew that too, logically. And yet, I feared. I must be catching my brother's paranoia. 

"For the sake of your friends, then. Artanis and Turkáno clamor so to have you reside with us."

"I am content here, Lord Fingolfin."

In this hovel, low of ceiling and scant of room, what did he find lovely? Russandol had found low ceilings claustrophobic, after his return from Angband, and had avoided them since. 

There were oils on the mantel, in a place of pride. 

"He has begun painting again," I said, startled. 

Russandol had not painted after the loss of his right hand, saying that he ought to focus on relearning useful skills. He used to paint infrequently in Tirion. While he had neither the training nor the inclination to learn technique methodically, it must be the art in his blood that had led to his ability to sketch inanimate subject matter remarkably well. 

He had not painted anyone before, to the best of my knowledge, and yet there was Húrin rendered in oils, bent over his rake, toiling under grey skies, on a hillside of plenty. In Russandol's paint, the hovel was a homely home, and the ploughsman was a beloved, painted soft in shades of rich amber among a bounty of gourd and grape. 

This was not a tryst. 

"When I went to him first, he showed me the bathhouses he had built per your instructions. He showed me his hothouses where he grew mandrakes and poppies. I failed to fathom why he relied on his opiates. When Melian sent me to him after I was let loose from Angband, I needed his mandrakes to alleviate the pain that settled deeper in me with every breath dragged into my ruined body." Húrin grinned, shaking his head. "I, who had been once quick to judge him for his vices, knew then why he had come to terms with them. Chronic pain is no clean ending on a battlefield. His veins were blue and his heart beat arrhythmic, and the power that blazed in him as he leeched away Morgoth's venom was timeless, contained brittle in the dying bones and skin of him. _What would you do, if you could?_ I asked him afterwards, weeping over the shaking that had settled perpetually into his fingers. _A painting of you in that valley surrounded by snowcapped mountains, as you stood then upon wildflowers with your heart in your hands_." 

He looked at the oil painting and smiled gently. "He has always found his way home." 

\----------------

That night, as I waited for Fëanáro to finish his wrestling with the blankets to lay them symmetrically to the whims of his obsessive mind, I thought of the hodge-podge decor of the homestead the greatest warrior of Arda kept. 

"You have been brooding," my brother remarked, having finally resolved the matter of blankets to his satisfaction. "Is it perhaps a newfound realization after your visit to Húrin that one does not need gold and gilded halls to be content?"

"Gold and gilded halls take nothing away from my contentment," I said mildly. "In fact, Russandol and I have been debating if we should inlay gold or pearl into the walls of the new baths we mean to build."

"Why don't you let me build it for you?" My brother suggested. "Send me your sketches. I shall see to the rest."

"Generosity, brother mine?"

"Merely sparing myself from beholding a gilded monstrosity everyday."

"Húrin's minimalism-" I began, trying to thread my thoughts into cohesion. "It pleases him. I admit I am baffled, but it takes all kinds, or so I am told." 

"Character growth, Nolofinwë," Fëanáro said sweetly. 

If he carried on riling me, I saw another session of fornication on the cards. No, I told myself! He would fuss over the blankets again and ruin my afterglow. 

"He is deeply in love," I said quietly. 

"Maitimo kept house with that wizard for centuries."

"How did you find out?" 

"After the wizard returned him from Nienna's lands, I feared that the trauma of Ektelë's tutelage and Nienna's realm may have left him vulnerable to grooming and exploitation by a figure of trust," Fëanáro said softly.

"He was a boy!" I exclaimed, horrified. "Olorín would not have groomed a boy to be his lover! You are paranoid."

The more I mulled over the frightening import of his words, the less I fathomed. Olorín had been renowned for his lack of interest in the material. Russandol had been a late bloomer in matters of sex and love. There had not been a scent of scandal to his name. 

"He was closely watched," I pointed out. "The rumors would have spread as wildfire."

"Not if the wizard had a trick or two up his sleeve to walk unseen," Fëanáro pointed out. 

"That was Curonir," I remarked. There was no stopping my brother once he had latched on to a theory. 

"You are naive," my brother rejoined. "They were lovers already, when Olorín returned him to us. I had him followed. I had Maitimo followed on his rides to Valmar. While there was a dynamic of the teacher and the student, neither of them seemed worried or coerced."

I could not decide what alarmed me more: my brother's obsessive attempt at parenting or Russandol seducing a wizard.   
  
"I did not mean to take him away from you purely because of my selfishness," Fëanáro confessed. "I was also afraid that neither our father nor you would be able to see and stay his precociousness in many matters."

Precociousness? An utter lack of self-preservation, I would say! The wizard could have turned him into a frog if they had argued! I exhaled gustily. It mattered not. When Morgoth had thrust his sword into my guts, the doom had been stark and cold on his monstrous brow. 

"He was not to blame," I said sharply. 

"No," Fëanáro agreed. "It was our fault for trusting Ektelë. It was Ektelë's fault for believing in prophecies. Knowing who to blame solves nothing for a victim. Maitimo trusted none of us to find him justice." 

"He trusted a wizard?" I asked, skeptical.

"He loved the wizard," Fëanáro replied, yawning. "I merely meant to say, before we digressed, that he is not one to tryst at whim. The soul endures, Nienna held, and his certainly remembers on some level that he had loved Húrin before."

"It was a summer's tryst," I recollected Húrin's words. "A blink of an eye to the Eldar."

"You know what they say of my mother and Círdan," Feanor said irritably. 

Míriel had kept a lock of Círdan's beard in the locket of her necklace. There were rumors that they had become friends by the lake they had awoken beside. Our father had been jealous, even after they had crossed the sea, even if Círdan's name had not crossed Míriel's lips once. They had not argued, but his doubts had poisoned their marital happiness. When she had died, she had died clutching her locket. Our father had married Indis in spite, and had then come to his senses, and mourned Míriel for the rest of his life. 

A blink of an eye to the Eldar, and it had broken our family long before my brothers and I had been born. 

"There was only you," I confessed to Fëanáro. "There was only you, even when I wished otherwise." 

He kissed me then. 

"You needn't say anything," I told him, having no desire to hear of the woman who had given him seven sons. 

"I would not have burned the ships for her," he said. 

Stranding me on the ice had become an expression of love in his demented head. I lamented my poor choices and held him close. 

\----------

Macalaurë returned to us, thin and pale as a wraith, and only his bright smile belied his joy. 

I looked to Findaráto, who excelled at conveying unpleasant tidings. Then I took a deep breath and waited for Macalaurë's dismay. To my shock, he merely nodded and embraced Findaráto.   
  
When he came to me, he must have noticed my worry, for he said plainly, with his customary unflinching honesty, "Uncle, I have him alive and with me. The rest matters not." 

Then he grinned and said warmly, "I have my family alive and with me. The rest matters not." 

He had spent ages of the world wandering alone. Pity and sorrow seized me, but he shook his head. 

"Macalaurë!" 

"My dearest Artanis!" He greeted her, laughing when she rushed to him. 

He caught her and spun her about, before setting her down gently and falling to a knee before her and bestowing a courtly kiss upon her hand with panache. And I had wondered why Artanis had fallen in love with him. 

\---------

"Macalaurë shall gouge my eyes with a spoon," Fëanáro lamented, when I went to the forge where he was hiding. 

"Morgoth gouged my eyes with his nails," I reminisced. 

Fëanáro stared at me horrified, before dropping his face into his hands and starting to weep. His tendency to lapse into sobbing at the least of my comments troubled me. 

I ought to have fallen in love with Arafinwë. No, I thought hastily. His obsession with the theatre would have sent me mad. 

I sighed and went to hold my sobbing brother, and hoped the soot and sweat and smoke on him would not ruin my fine garments. I had found myself better at comforting him through sexual congress than with my words. Best set to it then. I pushed him against the table, and winced at the clatter of quills and ink pots and various instruments. 

He enjoyed being taken in his forge. The chance of discovery by Telpë or Ereinion or one of his apprentices unsettled me, but when he lay splayed out before me, impatient and demanding and noisy, I could not blamed for my lapse in judgement. 

Afterwards, as I picked out wood shavings from his hair, he said, "This is Atarinkë's table."

I shrugged. Our children were used to our depravities. 

"Have you forgiven me?" He asked, stretching languidly, and the rippling shift of muscles underneath his skin made me want to demand that he sit for a portrait. 

I was sure I could find a discreet artist somewhere in the villages. Findaráto might know. He collected paintings of nude men and displayed them brazenly in his quarters. 

"Nolofinwë?" 

A brother that burned the ships, a brother that turned away to beg the Gods, and I had stood on the Ice desperately frightened for our children. Abandoned by a madman and a coward, I had been ordinary and alone. 

"You are my brother," I said tiredly, and then kissed him quiet. 

Fëanáro and Arafinwë took after our father, and had his many virtues, and had inherited his selfishness and myopia too. I had been the only one to take after Indis. 

My mother had cut her wrists and bled to death in the shadow of Míriel's statue, after she had lost us all. She had loved my father's children, indiscriminate to what womb had birthed them. 

I was her son. I had not learned how to hate my family. 

\------

"Perhaps a marriage?" I mulled. 

"Nolofinwë, she stabbed Tyelko!" Russandol protested. "We cannot send them to a marital bed and hope that they shall survive the night!"

A marital bed? Irissë and Tyelko, bucolic as they were, had no qualms in making love on horseback before our people. 

"Well, their exhibitionism is safer," I allowed. "At least someone might intervene should they start wounding each other." 

Russandol hummed, deep in his thoughts. We had been summoned by the maids to my daughter's quarters, and had found Artanis stitching Tyelko's many knife wounds. Turkáno had been holding Irissë, imploring her to calm. Faint-headed as I was, I had been glad that Russandol had taken charge of the situation and promptly dispatched me to the forge. Fëanáro had not been there, but Ereinion had kept me engaged in easy conversation until I was summoned back to the house. 

"Perhaps you are right, after all," Russandol opined. "A marriage might be exactly what she needs to take her mind off her sorrow." 

She waited for her son in vain by the lake, and the obsession had carven her to spite and resentment. She had accused my brother of being undeserving. While I may not have made up my mind on what forgiveness meant, I refused to permit others castigate Fëanáro. 

"I cannot wait to plan a wedding!" Russandol said cheerfully then. 

And they wondered who had raised him! The boy was shaped in my mould! We settled down, enthused, to discuss all manner of decor and feasts. 

\-----

I did not believe in inevitabilities, just as Fëanáro refused to believe in the impossible turning possible. 

The eventide that followed Macalaurë's return, even I had to admit, was an inevitability. Macalaurë had not breathed a word of what he had been to his brother once. He had not taken the initiative to rebuild their closeness. And yet, they began to orbit each other.

"I give it a matter of months," Artanis predicted, dainty on my chaise, as she nibbled at the dried apricots and cheese I had set out for her. 

She would wander into my quarters every now and then, and then chatter endlessly about this or that. I was always glad to see her. I loved Irissë dearly, but Artanis was mine too, after her father had entrusted her to me on the Ice.   
  
"We ought to be careful," I remarked. "Húrin is a good man and beloved to our family." 

"Húrin knows the inevitability of this just as well as any of us," Artanis said quietly. "Their love broke fate's loom, shattered the Gods, and birthed creation."

"Such fancifulness, Artanis!" I complained lightly. "You ought to look into writing a drama."

"I imagine my father's penchant for theatre runs in me!" She exclaimed, laughing. The flash of sadness in her gaze was swiftly replaced by serenity. "Oh, Nolofinwë, Turkáno and I are writing a book about our family's misadventures."

"Keep my orgies out of it," I warned her. 

"Nobody cares about your orgies," she said dismissively. "Instead, we mean to write of how you were a painted trollop luring our uncle from Nerdanel."

"Merely one mistake of many," I sighed. 

"Your arrangement with him reminds me of my marriage with Celeborn," she remarked then, sobering. "We loved each other once, and I daresay our love, while it waxed and waned, remained a constant. Nevertheless, I doubt either of us had forgiven each other for anything that had ruptured our trust. Love is love. It is not forgiveness."

Macalaurë had spoken to me of how the striations of Celeborn's grief had been the last music in the old world before they had heralded dusk with rising tide and shifting earth and white flames. 

"Did you attempt to forgive him?" I asked Artanis softly. 

"What is forgiveness?" She wondered. "We returned to each other, again and again."

  
\-------------------- 

"I acknowledge that we have an accord that I shan't interfere in the matters of your children." 

Your children, not our children. Good. He was a terrible parent. 

"What are you plotting?" I asked him, once my mind moved past that wording. 

"Maitimo took Macalaurë to his bed," Fëanáro said. He sounded worried. 

"And?"

"Well, someone must break the news to Húrin!" 

"Altruism, brother of mine?" 

"He is a good man. He defied Morgoth for our family," Fëanáro said quietly. "He mourns his wife and children. He is the only one of his kind here. The gift of Eru to his kind is that of an eternal ending. He was stripped of it. You and I know what that must mean." 

Húrin's life on Arda had been tragic, and yet he had not loathed our family for his suffering. He had buried his wife and children. He had stood between Turkáno and an army of Balrogs. He had stood between Russandol and Gothmog. He had been denied his eternal peace, and he had not voiced a word of spite. I might not approve of Húrin's architecture or decor, and was aghast at his trough and lack of plumbing, but my brother was right.

"You are right." 

"You seem surprised," Fëanáro said, laughing. 

\--------------- 

I took myself to the riverbank, to the clover fields that were in bloom. Pink and white dotted the green, and I plonked myself down underneath a mighty cedar to watch the ducks waddle about on the river. There was a cluster of mandragora budding to fruit, and a few straggling purple flowers swayed coy in the breeze. There were dragonflies and bees humming overhead, and birds chattering away in the high branches. 

What does it mean to create a world? 

What does it mean to create?

Ektelë had believed in prophecies. He had petitioned our father to teach Russandol. Despite Laurefindë and Salmë trying their best to curtail his cruel methods of teaching, he had taught the child to detach, to kill. And then he had sent the boy to Nienna, to teach him the arts of the mind. He had threatened Russandol with dire consequences should he complain to me, and the boy had not spoken a word to any of us about his ill-treatment or the brutal education imparted to him. Olorín, Incanus, the master of minds, had been appointed as his tutor by Nienna. Horrified by what Ektelë had taught the boy, by what Nienna had abetted, Olorín had deserted his post and returned the boy to us. It had been necessary, Ektelë had said vehemently, when we had summoned him to our court of justice. It had been necessary, because a dead woman had seen the future, he claimed. Our father had no choice, but to let him go, because he had invoked the name of the Broideress. 

I had not believed in sorcery, prophecies or foresight, considering them arcane gifts bestowed by Eru to the Wizards or the Gods. Then I had died, underneath an eagle's mighty wings, and Morgoth had stood over me with doom marking his brow, and I had cursed Ektelë with my last breath. 

"I thought I might find you here." 

Russandol had come with a picnic basket. 

I helped him lay out a checkered blanket, arrange scones and jams and tea upon it. There were apples, plucked fresh from our orchards. There was pickled gourd, from Húrin's hillside. There was salted mackerel, from Ereinion's latest attempt to recreate what he had eaten on Círdan's barges. 

"I told Húrin," he said quietly, watching the dragonflies, twirling idly the mandragora flowers he had plucked at whim. 

He had been a boy with a butterfly net his father had made, chasing dragonflies on a field of clover to prove to the Gods that I was not a perversion of Eru's creation. 

"He asked me to stay away," he continued, and the conflict on his features made me clasp his hands in mine. "I have no desire to cause him anguish, Nolofinwë. What must I do?"

"He may not visit us again!" He said, frightened. "It shall be my fault, to have parted him from his friends, from Turkáno and Artanis and everyone that loves him."

Self-recrimination had plagued Russandol once. I refused to allow it to prey on him again. As a poison from a wound, I told myself. 

"They know their way to his hillside hovel," I said mildly. "Artanis rode to him today morning. For his sake, I hope he shan't set her loose in his vegetable garden."

He nodded, still lost to thought. After a few long moments of deliberation, he acquiesced, saying, "I shall write to him in a few weeks."

"Let him be," I warned him. "Let him choose his time." 

"Is that all I can do?"

"Perhaps not, but it is his wish."

We lapsed into silence again. 

I contemplated barring Ereinion from salting fish, aghast at the travesty that he had committed upon the poor mackerel. He ought to stick to the forge. He was swiftly becoming an excellent artisan in the medium of wood and ore. Fëanáro was a good teacher, though a stern one.

"I cannot imagine how dearly I must have loved Macalaurë," Russandol said abruptly, staring at the purple stains the mandragora blooms had left on his hands. 

"Dearly, and he loved you long before he knew to speak your name," I said honestly. 

Fëanáro had once worried that our incestuous relationship had influenced Macalaurë to look at his brother so. Fëanáro had been blind to his children's hearts. Macalaurë had known the course of his heart as a babe. Russandol had warped Eru's creation in his name.

Fëanáro and I had loved, and it had ended in ashes on the Ice and burning sails. Perhaps it was our temperaments that had led to violence and destruction and betrayal. We had been fiercely proud, eager to be renowned, ambitious and greedy to possess each other. Love was love. It was not forgiveness. 

Artanis had the right of it. 

"He frets over his father's approval," Russandol commented wryly. 

"Your father too," I said, with reluctance, and the old pang of loss was brittle in my chest. "He is your father too. The Silmarilli came to you because you were his son."

On a clover field, long ago, Russandol had regretted the promise he had sworn to me. We had not spoken of it again. 

He did not remember, I told myself. He did not remember that I had surrendered a claim to keep him in my care. Even if he had forgotten, I had not, and I continued to keep that promise I had sworn to my brother. 

"When Findekáno and Artanis brought me to you, I knew I was safe, though I knew not your name or face, though I knew not what I had meant to you," Russandol said thoughtfully, eyes faraway. 

How apropos, I thought, that he had forgotten the past. Artanis claimed that she had plucked the core of him. I believed her. The core of him, after all, had been a man who looked to neither the present nor the past, who looked ever to the future. 

Then his eyes cut to me, and the spark in them was serene and potent, and I remembered the stars falling from Varda's heart, and for the first time my bones knew not the psychosomatic cold of the Helcaraxë. 

"I did not know what I had meant to you," he continued speaking. "I knew, immediately, instinctively, irrefutably, what you meant to me." 

I had been a lonely man, devoid of purpose, in my father's mansion, until Nerdanel had given birth to a babe, until Fëanáro had taken himself and his lovely wife away abandoning the child to my care. I had known my purpose when I had held the child for the first time. 

I had named him. 

His mother's name for him had faded away. The name his father had bestowed on him had faded away. My name for him remained. 

"Russandol," I named him once more, and the name became a claim spoken aloud for the first time. 

On a field of clover, underneath a cedar ageless and gnarly, over a picnic of salted fish and apples from our trees, as the breeze soaked us in the sweet fragrance of the mandragora, I had dared voice my greatest secret. 

"The names that mean us the best," he said brightly, sincerely, curling his flower-stained fingers over mine, and the joy in him was birthed of my truth illumined. 

\-------

I went to the forge. 

Fëanáro was hammering a sheet of metal, intensely focused and lost to the world. I waited until he had completed his task and laughed at his startled gasp when he saw me beside him. 

"You have pollen in your hair," he said, looking me over in surprise. "And your clothes are stained by dew and grass. You smell of cedar and mandragora and the river's salt. Have you been tumbling barkeeps in the grass, brother?" 

He brandished the leash at his waist in threat. I remained the only man he had bedded, as Nerdanel remained the only woman. His inexperience was stark to my profligacy, but his self-assurance far outstripped mine. 

Good that I knew how to strip him of his smugness. 

"I forgive you," I told Fëanáro. 

Speaking those words sent me reeling, as a drowning man flung ashore greedy for life's breath. 

My brother's grip over the hammer slackened. I hastily shoved him away so that it might not fall on his shoes. 

"Again," he demanded, wide-eyed and scared and shaking. "Tell me again." 

"I forgive you," I repeated. 

The gyves on my heart had fallen to dust. 

"You are not lying," he breathed, rattled by my statement. 

"I make a terrible liar," I groused. "You know very well that I have never lied to you."

"Only the once," he admitted, skirting around the hammer, coming to clasp my shoulders. "Only when you said that you would raise him as mine." When I made to speak, he shook his head firmly, saying, "You broke a single promise over the course of our lives. I broke every one of mine."

"Loyal heart," he continued, grinning, clutching me as if he were afraid I might flee him. 

Lore called my father's grandchildren loyal hearts, for how they had loved and fought until the end for each other. My brothers and I had not known such unity, but I had wanted it for us desperately even when I had been alone on the Ice watching Fëanáro's burning sails and Arafinwë's retreat. 

"I knew you would forgive me!" He exclaimed then, giddy and overjoyed, spinning me about as a dervish. 

"Carry on so, and I might return to my barkeeps," I warned him, though I could not stop myself from laughing and clutching at him in turn. 

"You and I know that no barkeep can keep up with your insatiable lustiness," he said, unbothered by my threats. "Fuck every barkeep from here to Húrin's hill, and you shall still demand me in your bed at nightfall."

This, then, was forgiveness.

\----------------

Irissë wed Tyelko in our gardens. 

We had feasted for days and nights on end. Even my brother, recluse that he was, had stirred himself from the forge to celebrate. I suspected that he adored Irissë the most, among all our children. He had always wanted a daughter. 

"Try this!" Ereinion insisted, wafting a platter underneath our noses. 

Salted oysters. I hoped Artanis was not in our vicinity. She would faint at this travesty. 

Russandol, eager to encourage Ereinion's pursuits, valiantly sampled the offering. As soon as Ereinion turned to chase down Telpë and feed him the wares, Russandol stole my wine glass. I had never seen anyone empty a glass of wine so swiftly. 

"If you remembered, you would draw a comparison to the mice of Angband," Macalaurë said peaceably. "I suspect you might prefer the mice."

"It is not that bad," Russandol held. 

I raised an eyebrow. 

"It could be worse!" He insisted, as he reached for the pickled turnips from Húrin's hillside to cleanse his palate. 

"When you were ill, Ereinion made you a soup from wild cockerel. Elrond and I were unable to assess if your hallucinations were the usual fare or elicited by Ereinion's culinary adventures."

Macalaurë spoke of old tragedies with calm serenity. His obstinacy had turned to wisdom. His possessiveness had mellowed to grace. He had come to an easy accord with Húrin. He had made his peace with Findekáno. 

"He must have merely meant to help me along with my sight," Russandol said placidly. "I promised Artanis a dance. Pray, leave some of the salted oysters for me." 

"Look at them," Macalaurë said wryly. "I cannot fathom they ended the sovereignty of the Valar." 

Artanis and Russandol were waltzing, poorly, laughing and without synchrony. The last time I had seen her truly happy on the dance floor, she had been in her father's arms in Tirion. 

"Have you considered my suggestion?" I asked him. 

Irissë and Tyelko were overjoyed by their marriage. Surely more weddings could only bring us joy. I admitted to myself that I enjoyed planning a spectacle. My brother had taken to sleeping in the forge for nights on end, tired as he was of hearing of my plans for courses and floral arrangements. I must have truly wrung him out with my scheming, for him to not even risk sex lest I inflicted on him my ideas for wedding canopies afterwards. 

He had complained, at length, that my sole contribution to my own wedding had been a desperate search our father and my brothers had conducted to find me on the morn, and their utter mortification when they had found me well-fucked and replete in Laurefindë's bed. 

At least, I held, it had bonded my brothers for a day, as they lamented together my lack of virtue. 

"Perhaps next spring," I urged Macalaurë again. "When the clover fields are in bloom." 

Macalaurë laughed, and reminded me, "We are brothers, Nolofinwë."

"It shan't matter. Our family has known worse." 

I had to win him over! Russandol had taken after me too well, and he respected the institution of marriage as much as I did. The only reason he might tolerate the charade would be to please his brother. Macalaurë was hidebound to tradition. He must certainly long for it! 

He said nothing for a few moments, deep in his musings. Then he replied thoughtfully, "What is a wedding, if not a promise mutually made to have and to hold, if not a promise accepted by those who loved us? We lived our vows, Nolofinwë. Everyone who knew us knew that. We needed nothing more. We need nothing more." 

"If he does not remember-" I began hopefully, in love with my idea of weddings.

"Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing—  
As when the dreamer sees and after the dream  
the passion endures, imprinted on his being.  
Though he cannot recall the rest,  
Though the oracle sees no longer his west,  
I am the same:  
his home, his heart, his whole."

He had not sung for us since his arrival. Daeron of Doriath had wept in my court, upon hearing my nephew's voice raised in song. Molten gold, Fëanáro had called it, with his penchant for describing great and terrible beauty in words of metal and metallurgy. Apt, for how Macalaurë's voice weighed down my heart and stripped it to nakedness.

Macalaurë grinned then, shaking his head. "I suspect we were the first and the last to be wed by Varda's blessing."

Seeing my shock, he began to explain.

"It was the last barter Russandol made. He sought her protection for me. What need had I for protection when his sacrifice hallowed me? She knew that. She blessed us instead, under her stars." 

The stars she had kindled had fallen from her as tears, as she watched Morgoth and Manwë disintegrate. There had been only serenity in her when the primordial had begun eating her into nothingness. She had silently allowed Artanis to steal the light of the stars to pull off a last miracle. 

Manwë and Morgoth had been brothers. Manwë had taken their sister as consort. This sister of theirs had loved Morgoth. Everyone knew that tale of old. _Aure Entuluva_ , she had promised Morgoth, and had drawn a veil of stars on the dark skies of the east for him. 

It had been said that Varda did not support the laws of the Valar on the matter of incest, considering it hypocritical to forbid the Eldar when Manwë had wed his sister. They had often said that our house was beloved to Varda. I had not believed, for what token had she given us when the Valar had doomed us and slaughtered us? 

I thought of how I had stood helpless on the Ice, between the brothers I loved, between the coward who had retreated and the madman who had burned the ships. 

Varda had lived suspended between her brothers, just as I had. Her passivity had come from helplessness, from a desperate desire to keep her family intact. 

I forgave her.

\------ 

_Passim_. 

Húrin named the book of our tales that Artanis and Turkáno had toiled to compile together. 

_Passim_ had been my oath to Fëanáro, when he clung to me after our father's death. _Here and there and everywhere, I shall follow you, to all places and beyond._

Our children and their children had kept the oaths my brothers and I had broken, with hearts that braved every fate.

Passim had been the beat of Findekano's loyal heart as he walked to Angband alone. It had been every breath of Macalaurë as he kept his deathwatch over the soul that endured. It had been Turkáno sacrificing a daughter for the prophecy he had kept faith in. It had been Findaráto's last stand in a tower of song. It had been Ereinion's brittle courage as he rode to Mordor to save our people in the stead of a father that had not wanted him. 

_Passim_ had been Artanis's lonely warsong and Russandol's mandragora-stained promise. 

They had followed each other, from creation to creation, _passim_ , and even the Gods had fallen to the chorale of the seven. 

\------ 

"Here," my brother said, dropping a wrapped package onto my lap when I sat down before my mirror to undo my braids. 

I unwrapped the parcel to find a comb, ornate, with golden mandragora leaves inlaid delicately upon its handle of cedar. Seven teeth it bore. 

I smiled at him when our eyes met in the mirror. Emboldened by my acceptance, he grabbed his gift and began to comb my hair. He worked with gentle, clever, swift hands. He was shifting his weight restlessly from foot to foot, never one to subside into stillness. 

I remembered the flitting, fluttering, lively bluejays in our father's garden I had once compared to him. When I sat at my bay window and wrote my journal everyday, they would come to me, heads cocked, bright-winged, carefree in the light of Laurelin. I had made the poor, unwitting birds my confidantes, confessors, and companions. 

Fëanáro was singing as he ran the comb over my hair, his motions easy and even. His gaze held a strange emotion when he met my eyes again in the mirror. Contentment, I realized. I had not seen him content before. 

"Joy becomes you," I told my brother. 

His hands faltered in their rhythm, but his voice was steady when he spoke.

"And you, my constant heart."

* * *

**Author's Note:**

>   
> Sunset is maintained at a [Dreamwidth repository](https://the-song-of-sunset.dreamwidth.org). It is a set of stories that can be read as standalone or as a full alternate universe.


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